Instant messaging networks in the current art, examples of which include AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger, among others, have increasingly gained popularity as a form of on-line activity, at least in part because they allow users to communicate with one another in a virtually real-time manner, providing what amounts to online conversation. There are many similarities in such systems, and examples of such systems in current art have been described, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,430,602, entitled “Method and System for Interactively Responding to Instant Messaging Requests,” issued on Aug. 6, 2002 to Kay et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 6,301,609, entitled, “Assignable Associate Priorities for User-Definable Instant Messaging Buddy Groups,” issued on Oct. 9, 2001 to Aravamudan et al., both of which are incorporated herein in their entirety by reference. These references provide considerable detail about architecture and other details of state-of-the-art instant messaging systems, reproduction of which should not be necessary in the present application.
Online messaging systems in the art at the time of the present patent application are typically proprietary systems requiring installation of software on a user's computer, and as a result, typically the user of a particular instant messaging system, such as AOL Instant Messenger, can only communicate with users of the same system.
Further to the above, prior art instant messaging networks are relatively difficult to set up, at least in part because of certain effects stemming from characteristics of an overall network. For example, for such a network to be useful, there should be a relatively large number of users. This fact can pose a significant challenge to relatively small, start-up instant messaging operators which may not have the resources to build a network of a large number of users in a relatively short time. Relatively small telephone companies had similar difficulty competing with larger ones in the early growth of publicly switched telephone networks (PSTN) in the early 1900s.
Typically, a provider of an instant messaging system relies on existing users to find one another's contact information and to invite new users to join the particular system. A mechanism that is often employed to facilitate such growth in the system is to provide each user a unique screen name and in turn, to allow each user to maintain a list of contacts by screen name (sometimes called buddy lists in the art) who also are enabled and have access to the same messaging system. As more users are added to the particular instant messaging system and/or existing users add additional users to their buddy lists, the particular instant messaging system grows. Generally speaking, the more users with which each user is enabled to communicate in an instant messaging system, either through addition of new users or by allowing more existing users to find each other and communicate, the more successful the particular instant messaging system will be.
To allow users to find each other and to add more contacts to their own buddy lists, which facilitates growth and functionality of the system, users of existing systems may be enabled to perform textual searches using screen names or other information relating to other users as search criteria, and then add users, one at a time, to their buddy lists. Further, a user may invite others to join the network, such as by sending an email to the potential new user. In both of these situations one user is trying to establish communication with one other user, who may or may not yet be a member to the particular instant messaging network, and the seeking user needs to obtain the contact information of the target user.
Growing an instant messaging system using the prior art techniques described above may take considerable time, during which period existing users may cease using the system due to a lack of sufficient other users with whom to communicate. Furthermore, an existing user may have difficulty obtaining the necessary contact information, such as email, screen names, and so on, of other persons who may or may not belong to the network.
What is clearly needed to enable more rapid growth of new instant messaging systems is a method and mechanism that provides a more robust ability to find and list current members, and to add new members to the system.